The Outstater
Lucas Oil Stadium: A Big Hole in the Roof
IT WAS AN OUTRAGEOUS admission: Officials do not know the exact cost of the subsidized Lucas Oil stadium, specifically that part assigned to the retractable roof.
The Colts had told the Indianapolis Star that the team was never given a “line item” on how much the roof added to the price of the stadium. Now Rick McKinney, a former member of the Hamilton County Council and the lone vote against the expenditure, estimates it was close to $100 million.
“I objected at the time because I thought it would rarely be open, which has been true,” McKinney told the Star. “But it was a new toy, and other cities were getting them, like Phoenix and Houston.”
It was a rare glimpse into how eco-devo is done — behind closed doors, using other people’s money, ostensibly for a popular cause. Moreover, the Star had reported earlier that the roof was opened for only 38 of the Colts’ 130 regular-season games, or 29.2 percent of the time. Do the math.
More than worth it, says a former Indianapolis deputy mayor now with the Colts. He believes the stadium and the roof have done their job. The Super Bowl in 2012, a NCAA March Madness tournament and an upcoming Taylor Swift concert were mentioned.
“I think the stadium’s paid those dividends,” he told the Star,“and then some.”
Really? In a cost-benefit sense? A friend, an economist, once told me that having a professional football team in your city is equivalent in new wealth to just three Walmarts, not the size of economic development that justifies writing a blank check.
In any case, the Colts spokesman was not pressed to back up his claim of wealth inflow with real numbers. Nor was he asked about opportunity costs, i.e., what otherwise might have been done with that property and that size of investment, Ms. Swift’s visit notwithstanding.
Again, officialdom here does not make available the type of independent data that in other cities have shown that subsidized stadiums are a boondoggle if not a fraud perpetrated on the back of imaginary job multiples. For an exhaustive study and an interactive chart of stadium funding from the American Economics Association, click here and weep.
The conclusion: “Cross-sectional studies comparing cities with teams to similar cities without teams find no evidence of extra economic growth or income associated with a team. Other studies that tracked cities over time as they gained new teams also came up empty: if anything, a new franchise can act as a slight drag on economic growth.”
By the way, did taxpayers get any of the money for naming the stadium something so awkward and irrelevant?
They’re Back! The IU Protestors
AS ACTIVISTS posing as students return to the Indiana University campus, the administration waived copies of the “Independent Post-Action Review of the April 2024 Indiana University Encampment Protests.” The hope was that it would slow a movement to transfer the campus from Indiana to a more suitable location, Gaza perhaps.
It did not. Indeed, the review of 10,000 internal documents and emails is unconvincing that the university’s core mission is even intact. Specifically, no administrator or senior faculty member stepped forward during the protests to say unequivocally that the university could not allow any disruption of classroom teaching or faculty research, which, lest we forget, are the primary justifications for the university’s $4.2-billion budget.
“Colleges and universities should be sanctuaries for teaching and learning,” says Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “That is their unique role. No pressure group should have the right to draw time and resources away for that special, sacred mission.”
Contrast that with a spokesperson summarizing the IU report: “We found that the university’s actions were driven by a focus on campus safety and free speech in a challenging and rapidly evolving situation.”
Utterly excusable, in other words. Life in Bloomington, please know, is all relative. The birds sing, the lilies bloom, sweet breezes blow and cultures are interchangeable. There are no absolutes there, no lines that cannot be crossed, which, ironically, is now the predicament of the IU trustees.
Perhaps having to commission a 177-page report and then actually read it is punishment enough for the trustees. But it would seem that such a tepid response to protests on the scale of the April encampments would be career-ending for at least one or two of those in charge. Neither the trustees nor the university leadership could summon the necessary moxie.
Rather, the impression was of a failing institution, one captured by internal and external elements irrelevant or even hostile to its mission, a capture no institution can survive.
Don’t send your children there unless things change.— tcl
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